Richard Dawkins is one of the most prominent atheists and evolutionary biologists of our time. His words on religion, faith, science and evolution resonate with thousands of people around the world. Regardless of the faith you believe in, his ideas, I believe, are worth thoughtful consideration. I know several of them might come across as controversial and polemic, but they carry a lot of thoughtfulness in them.
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If you are new to Dawkins works, I recommend reading one of his famous books titled The God Delusion. It is a great starting point if you want to explore the ideas of Richard Dawkins.
In this article, I will be sharing some famous Richard Dawkins quotes that discuss religion, faith and evolution. Hopefully these quotes can spark some interesting discussion and thought. Enjoy!
“Science is the poetry of reality.” — Richard Dawkins
“The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.”― Richard Dawkins
“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.” — Richard Dawkins
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”― Richard Dawkins
“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”― Richard Dawkins
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”― Richard Dawkins
“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”― Richard Dawkins
“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a ‘child of Muslim parents’ will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.”― Richard Dawkins
“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”― Richard Dawkins
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”― Richard Dawkins
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’. ― Richard Dawkins
“The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.” ― Richard Dawkins
“Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.”― Richard Dawkins
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”― Richard Dawkins
“The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.”― Richard Dawkins
“Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”― Richard Dawkins
“If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.”― Richard Dawkins
“Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility.”― Richard Dawkins
“The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.” — Richard Dawkins
“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” ― Richard Dawkins
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”― Richard Dawkins
